Part IV Rights, Ch.34 Positive Rights

Many national constitutions contain explicit positive rights: rights to goods such as education, shelter, medical care, decent work, and basic subsistence. The status of such rights in the United States Constitution, however, remains a source of political and scholarly controversy. Many argue that positive rights are simply excluded from the Constitution, while others insist that these guarantees are built into America’s constitutional structure, history, and text. The debate about the status of the positive rights in the Constitution has been wide-ranging,...